“Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever, because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.” ~Osho

“Faith is where you hold your heart.” This is what one of the master teachers shared when he was translating the ancient practices of Tantra yoga into a modern life. Tantra means to stretch beyond your limits. The multiple layers of practice that Tantra embodies have a singular goal of preparing you as a vessel that can contain the divine. One of the ancient texts says that our birth, our very life, is a gift so that the divine can know itself through you. And according to the texts there are many powers bestowed on those that actively pursue this faith, which as heady as all this sounds, translates seamlessly into the stuff of making love work on a daily basis. The beauty of focusing on these capacities is that they are at once prescriptive and rewarding, which is to say that they offer a clear measure of how you are holding your heart and whether there is any room for the magic of the divine to settle within you.  The following elements of Tantra can be used and defined in the contexts below.

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"Stir" Janice Porter

“And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make…” -The Beatles

I have come to say good bye to my friend as she enters the hospice phase of her cancer journey.   During the long 6 hour drive to get her, my memory of our meeting came back to me as though it was 20 days ago and not 20 years. She is an artist and most of my memories over the years with her are punctuated with her work- drawings for our almost card company landed on t-shirts and  long narrow canvases with the moon rising, illustrated children’s books and homemade games when our kids were smaller. In the midst of these memories, I welled up in tears, wishing I had been a better friend. I wished that I had looked for another way to reach her when our lives pulled us in different directions. Of all the friends I have known in my life, she is one of the very few who always had nothing but love for me.

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I have been studying gratitude as a the open door to a positive life and one of the most profound vehicles to love for some time. As part of my research, we have had an ongoing contest asking our readers to share their own stories of how gratitude has transformed their own lives and relationships. Here is an unforgettable story of gratitude.

I embrace the gift of how my life has developed from birth to now. At an early age, I was very visual. Reading books came easily to me by age 3 and is still one of my first loves. I am an accomplished writer with several books just sitting there for me to finish.  By the early teen years of my life, I became very accomplished at sketching. I especially enjoyed observing all the shadings of hands and faces and duplicating what my eyes could see on poster boards, a wall, chalk board or just notebook paper.  I have spent countless hours appreciating nature, down to the slightest detail like: how the leaves on a tree swaying in the breeze captures light and seem to sparkle in the sunlight; the perseverance of the ant who carries a crumb all the way across a wide driveway to the ant hill; the personality of birds in the morning with their unique chirps of urgency, joy, fear; the various smells on a country bike trail; the feel of clean flannel sheets in the bitter winter months,  the taste of kiwi in season. It seems that my whole life has been a festival of senses that I can have in memory to live over again as I please.

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Recognizing that our relationships are our most gentle teachers in life is a great way to approach the work involved in staying with them. We too often don’t value and trust the huge amounts of resources that we have invested into them and are too willing to dispose of them before really digging into the work before us. While some relationships were a bad idea from the day they started, the majority are actually perfectly designed to help us grow into the best people we can be. I have been sharing these love tips for years and consistently hear back from our friends and customers that doing the work of love rewards them in ways they couldn’t have imagined.   Remember that often the feeling of hitting the wall in love lives in us only moments before a breakthrough that gives meaning to our promises. Make this New Year full of love.

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“Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.” -Caroline Myss

The holidays present a feast of opportunity to listen to the wisdom in your broken relationships.  Most everyone shares these, whether they be wounds from a recent divorce, a sibling or parent relationship that remains sharp with bitterness, or a persistent disconnect with your partner, which the holiday season only serves to magnify. Old hurts seem to more easily resurface in the twinkling lights of what should feel loving and we frequently walk away from our holiday exchanges feeling more alone and less connected than ever. Even the empty space of silence that lives in the broken spaces between you and the people you once loved seem to expand at this time of year.

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Relationship Bootcamp Week 5

“Love doesn’t sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.”  ~Ursula K. LeGuin

Almost anyone can fall in love; our biological imperative to mate kicks in opening our hearts and flooding our nervous system with the euphoric experience of idealized connection. In these early moments of love’s embrace, we experience love viscerally. Every exchange is charged with the energy of passionate recognition and the deep cellular relief of being embraced just as we are.   Everyone who has fallen out of love knows how far the fall is. It is easy to become jaded in that challenging transition to loving someone, which doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the sweet fall. Keeping love going is an endurance sport.

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“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no bigger paradigm shift that a relationship experiences than in the aftermath of disclosing or discovering an affair. The betrayal cuts deep and shreds not only the trust between the couple, but often the ability to trust one’s own judgment and the agreements that we believed defined our lives. Less than a third of all couples who encounter the experience, which is more than half of all of us, actually heal the experience. Many couples never get beyond the initial crisis that the affair creates, choosing to leave the relationship with their wounds intact and the rest of the relationship in tatters.

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“Marriage problems are relationship problems; they are the result of how two people interact with each other. You may abandon a troubled marriage, but you will still bring the way you interact with others along with you.” -Mark Gungor

It has been years since I have been close to a divorce; however, I have witnessed many others from a distance over the years, mostly through the vacant expressions of the kids- friends of my own children- as they recount their new living arrangements. I remember my early adolescence, mostly lost in the battlefield of my parents’ divorce. Much of my middle school years are lost to me, a salvation of memory that works to erase the anger, cruelty and unspoken pain that became my family.

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“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”  ~Mohandas K. Gandhi

“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time….”  James Taylor’s voice crooned in my head.  This is a chorus that I am thankful to hear over and over again. In fact the older I get, the more that this simple truth has meaning. There really is no where that we are getting to and no arriving at a destination that defines us.  Our lives are like arrows on a trajectory of our intentions and learning to savor the moments that make up our daily experience is the foundation for loving yourself and others.

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“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.  It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”   ~Marianne Williamson

The single most troubling idea that we absorb growing up in the western world is that the pursuit of happiness happens out there. Most of us spend much of our lives seeking something outside of us that will make us happy. Advertising lures us to purchase fast cars and the latest high tech phone or gadget among the millions of other marketing ploys that cement in us the tragic misunderstanding that our happiness is out there somewhere waiting for us. Most of these messages confuse us even further because the happiness that is sold is a paired happiness. We believe that our relationships, like the stuff they accompany will also make us happy.

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